Friday, February 21, 2014

Arne Naess, in a seminal paper on environmental philosophy,
distinguished between two streams of environmental philosophy and
activism--shallow and deep. The deep, long-range ecology movement has developed
over the past four decades on a variety of fronts. However, in the context of
global conferences on development, population, and environment held during the
1990s, even shallow environmentalism seems to have less priority than demands
for worldwide economic growth based on trade liberalization and a free market
global economy.

"If nature is not a prison and earth a shoddy
way-station, we must find the faith and force to affirm its metabolism as our
own--or rather, our own as part of it. To do so means nothing less than a shift
in our whole frame of reference and our attitude towards life itself, a wider
perception of the landscape as a creative, harmonious being where relationships
of things are as real as the things. Without losing our sense of a great human
destiny and without intellectual surrender, we must affirm that the world is a
being, a part of our own body" (Shepard 1969, 3).

When Paul Shepard wrote this passage, he summarized a stream
of thought that was developing during the 1960s in the writings of Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, and Rachel Carson, among others. Two
books were particularly effective during the 1960s in stimulating conservation
activism, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Stewart
Udall's The Quiet Crisis (1963). These books emphasize both
the unintended and negative impact that certain human behaviors have on
ecological relationships and the philosophy that humans are part of, not apart
from, the rest of nature. This stream of thought and activism has been traced
to John Muir and Henry David Thoreau and to pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and
eventually to the Sumerians in the Epic of Gilgamesh at the beginning of
civilization (Nash 1989; Oelschlaeger 1991; Sessions 1981; Sessions 1995a).

Professor Arne Naess of the University of Oslo catalyzed
discussion of two streams of environmental philosophy when he articulated the
distinction between "shallow ecology" and the "deep, long-range
ecology movement" (DEM) in a short paper published in 1973. He
characterized the shallow ecology movement as "Fight against pollution and
resource depletion. Central objective: the health and affluence of people in
the developed countries" (Naess 1973).

When Naess outlined principles of the deep, long-range
ecology perspective, he included "fight against pollution and resource
depletion," but he went beyond that statement to include principles that
are not part of the dominant social paradigm. These included
"ecocentrism," "wide sustainability," "complexity, not
complication," and "rejection of man-in-environment image in favor of
a relational, total-field image" (Naess 1973). Naess made it socially acceptable
for academics to be activists on conservation issues by relating reflection to
action. He also showed how people can move from denial to creative, nonviolent
direct action based on their core values. 1

When Naess wrote his original essay on deep ecology, he knew
there was limited scientific data available on the impact of industrial
civilization on free nature. That is why he was inspired by both the science
and the feelings for free nature expressed by Rachel Carson in Silent
Spring. 2

The wave of enthusiasm for the environment that began with
Earthday 1970 was reaching a climax in the United States with the passage of
the federal Endangered Species Act. Many supporters of deep ecology in the U.
S. consider the federal Endangered Species Act to be the most ecocen-tric
environmental legislation because the underlying premise of the act is that
humans have no right to willfully cause the extinction of other species,
regardless of their value, or lack of value, for humans.

The Endangered Species Act therefore moves us, in the words
of Robyn Eckersley, "beyond human racism." "Green political
theorists can make a contribution here in critically exploring and articulating
fundamental value orientations and defending principles which enable the mutual
satisfaction of human and nonhuman needs. A more proactive task for green
political theorists might be to explore how social institutions might be
arranged to expand conventional boundaries of care in day to day practices,
while also redressing the problems of willful neglect and ignorance of ecosystems.
Indeed, in the light of the history of discrimination against nonhuman species,
it might even be said that there is now a case for 'affirmative action' for
nonhuman nature" (Eckersley 1998).

Many researchers have documented the recurring, anthropogenic-caused
collapse of natural systems at the regional or landscape level since modern
humans began spreading across the planet approximately 35,000 years ago.
However, the contemporary environmental crisis is the first planetary-wide
anthropogenically caused extinction crisis (Wilson 1992; Bright 1998) and
environmental crisis.

Much of the scientific research advanced during the 1970s,
which had been proclaimed the "decade of the environment" by
President Richard Nixon, is summarized in a report authorized by President
Jimmy Carter and published in 1980, The Global 2000 Report to the President:
Entering the Twenty-First Century (CEQ 1980). This report concluded, "if
present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted,
less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we
live in now (i.e., 1980). For hundreds of millions of the desperately poor, the
outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better. For many it
will be worse."

Those trends did continue, and the Global 2000 report was
written before the AIDS epidemic and before the emergence of a general
agreement among scientists that global warming is occurring, probably at least
partially due to anthropogenic causes.

While the Global 2000 report is phrased within the framework
of conservation of natural resources for human populations, it foreshadowed
reports written from a deep ecology perspective during the past two decades
that focus on "wide ecological sustainability." The well-known equation
I=PAT means that human impact on a region, or on the whole planet, is a
combination of human population growth, plus affluence (or rate of consumption)
and technology.

The Global 2000 report was intended as a warning to humanity
to collectively change its behavior, and this warning has been reaffirmed many
times during the past two decades. For example, using computer modeling of a
simulated world system, the authors of Beyond the Limits ran
several computer models of the 'world system' varying rates of resources use,
industrial output, human population growth, food production, and pollution.
Projected from 1900 to 2100, all of the computer runs, using different rates
for the different variables, forecast an overshoot of carrying capacity and
collapse of the collective human enterprise around 2050 (Meadows, Meadows, and
Rander 1992). They argue, however, that collectively the human species can
learn to change its behavior in a short (decade ) period of time and move into
a "sustainable" mode of collective behavior.

A convergence of various trends has led to what is
frequently called the "environmental crisis." On a finite planet
there is no "new land" available for expansion of industrial
civilization. Yet human population has continued to grow; per capita
consumption has increased; and technolo-gy has been applied on a grand scale.
Demographers proclaimed that the six billionth human was born in October 1999.
While some people believe that humans will find solutions to many problems
through technology, the pace of technological change continues to disrupt the
lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The process of worldwide economic integration, called
globalization, continues to disrupt the social and economic security of
billions of people while global warming, acid rain, destruction of the ozone
layer and other effects of industrial civilization undermine the integrity of
natural systems across the planet.

William Catton, Jr., a sociologist trained in ecological
theory, concluded that there are several modes of adaptation that societies may
take to ecologically inexorable change. In many contemporary societies
including both developed nations, such as the United Kingdom and the United
States as well as so-called Third World nations, such as India and China, many
people continue to insist that "sustainable" economic growth is
possible. Catton labels this mode of adaptation "ostrichism."

Some proponents of reform environmentalism used the images
of earth sent from platforms orbiting the earth in space to argue that
"spaceship earth" or the "blue planet" is an appropriate
image for "ecological consciousness" as a response to the
contemporary environmental crisis. However, critics writing from a deep ecology
perspective have warned that, at best, such
metaphors are ambiguous. For example, Wolfgang Sachs concluded that
"shooting a satellite into space is perhaps the most radical way of
establishing the distance from our world necessary for fantasies of large-scale
planning. The image of the Blue Planet--so small and easily
comprehensible--suggests that what has hitherto provided the preconditions for
diverse forms of human existence may now be planned and managed as a single
unit" (Sachs 1994).

In contrast, poet-ecophilosopher Gary Snyder suggests the
metaphor of humans singing and dancing around "a little watering hole in
deep space." The choice of metaphors and slogans is crucial for any social
movement. When supporters of deep ecology reject the phrase, "spaceship
earth," they are rejecting a mechanistic worldview. When they accept
slogans such as "Earth First!" or "thinking like a
mountain," they are rejecting human hubris and placing Homo
sapiens, as a species, in a more modest position in the cosmos.

In a short essay, "Modesty and the Conquest of
Mountains," Naess reflects that " . . . modesty is of little value if
it is not a natural consequence of much deeper feelings, and even more
important in our special context, a consequence of a way of understanding
ourselves as part of nature in a wide sense of the term. This way is such that
the smaller we come to feel ourselves compared to the mountain, the nearer we
come to participating in its greatness. I do not know why this is so"
(Naess 1979, 16).

In the face of a crisis of planetary scale, some radical
environmentalists argue that mild reforms in public policy and practices are
basically useless. Deep changes in society require a 'paradigm shift' from the
dominant modern paradigm of industrial civilization to a "new environmental
paradigm" or "new ecological paradigm" (Catton 1980b; Drengson
1980).

The Role of the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement in
Promoting Social Change

Several scholarly summaries of themes in the emerging DEM
and the deep ecology perspective show the intellectual development of the
movement over the past four decades (Devall 1979, 1980, 1991, 1995a, 1995b;
LaChapelle 1988; Sessions 1981). Anthologies drawing from the deep ecology
literature include those edited by Sessions (1995a) and Drengson (1995).

In 1984, while camping together in the California desert,
Arne Naess and George Sessions compiled the platform for the deep, long-range
ecology movement. Some supporters of the DEM assert that the 'platform'
is the "heart of deep ecology"
(McLaughlin 1993). Other supporters of the DEM disagree, arguing that the
gestalt of deep ecology, the intuition of deep ecology, is the heart of the
movement (Glasser 1997).

Naess said his purpose in developing this 'platform' was
'modest', that is, to develop a set of very general principles or statements
upon which supporters of deep ecology could comment and discuss. Naess's goal
is to help people articulate their own deep ecological total view. The deep
ecology "platform" therefore is a pedagogical tool to assist people
in the process of developing their own statement of ecosophy and as a device to
stimulate dialogue between supporters of and critics of the DEM.

Platform of Deep Ecology

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life
on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth; intrinsic value,
inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman
world for human purposes.

2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the
realization of these values and are also values in themselves.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and
diversity except to satisfy vital needs.

4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible
with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of non-human
life requires such a decrease.

5. Present human interference with nonhuman world is
excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

6. Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in
policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The
resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating
life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to
an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness
of the difference between big and great.

8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an
obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement
the necessary changes (this version of the deep ecology 'platform' is found in
Devall 1988).

The DEM is based on radical pluralism in 'foundational'
beliefs. Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Moslems,
pantheists, agnostics, and materialists can come to a kind of deep ecology
position or perspective both from their own experience (which Naess calls 'the
intuition of deep ecology') and from historic philosophic and religious
traditions (Naess 1989).

Naess defines ecosophy as " . . . a philosophy of
ecological harmony or equilibrium. A philosophy as a kind of sofia (or)
wisdom, is openly normative, it contains both norms, rules, postulates, value
priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs of our
universe. Wisdom is policy wisdom, prescription, not only scientific
description and prediction. The details of an ecosophy will show many
variations due to significant differences concerning not only the 'fact' of
pollution, resources, population, etc., but also value priorities' (in Sessions
1995a).

Thus, when individuals and communities articulate their own
authentic ecosophy they provide an intellectual and emotional basis for their
practice of deep ecology. Arne Naess calls his version "ecosophy T."
His philosophical reflection on his own ecosophy is based on his experiences in
a mountain hut in Norway where he has worked for many decades. A complimentary
statement of ecosophy by Vice President Albert Gore, Jr. is developed in his
book, Earth in the Balance (Gore 1992). Although Gore devotes
a few paragraphs in his book to denouncing "deep ecology" based on
misconceptions of the movement, his own ecosophy is grounded in deep ecology
kind of thinking (Glasser 1996; Carmer 1998).

The slogan, "simple in means, rich in ends,"
emphasizes that the DEM encourages rich experiences, and rich experience
includes experiences in free nature. As modern life continues to encroach on
our daily lives, millions and millions of people are less and less able to have
rich experiences in free nature. The importance of such experience is emphasized
in the growing field of ecopsychology.

For Naess, rich experiences in free nature contributes to a
sense of maturity. Both Dolores LaChapelle (1988) and Paul Shepard (1973, 1998)
have contributed thoughtful commentary on the usefulness of looking at other
cultures, especially primal cultures, for models of appropriate experiences
that encourage greater human maturity.

The practice of deep ecology includes both personal
lifestyles and community lifestyles (Devall 1993). In the United States several
organizations have arisen to assist individuals and communities who want to
change their lifestyles to incorporate simple means and rich experiences. 3

Some supporters of the DEM see a need to develop more
emphasis on developing public policy initiatives
from a deep ecology perspective. A recent study of the impact of deep ecology
perspectives on public policy in the United States concludes, "The deep
ecology movement continues to struggle against its critics with hopes of one
day transforming society and politics. Though deep ecologists have enjoyed
success in developing an alternative political and social vision from their
deep respect for nature, they have had only limited success in advancing their
agenda" (Cramer 1998, 226). However, many supporters of the DEM remain
quite active in politics. For example, Arne Naess who is in his 80s, continues
to engage in political action. The development of argumentation based on
Naess's principles provides a way of getting the camel through the eye of the
needle in making public policy decisions by establishing priorities for policy
and action (Glasser 1996).

Naess concludes that the DEM has a special role in political
life. "For one, it rejects the monopoly of narrowly human and short-term
argumentation patterns in favor of life-centered long-term arguments. It also
rejects the human-in-environment metaphor in favor of a more realistic
human-in-ecosystems and politics-in-ecosystems one. It generalizes most
ecopolitical issues: from 'resources' to 'resources for . . . '; from 'life
quality' to 'life quality for . . . '; from 'consumption' to 'consumption for .
. . '; where 'for . . . ' is, we insert 'not only humans, but other living
beings'. Supporters of the Deep Ecology movement have, as a main source of
motivation and perseverance, a philosophical/ecological total view (an
ecosophy) that includes beliefs concerning fundamental goals and values in life
which it applies to political argumentation. That is, it uses not only arguments
of the usual rather narrow kind, but also arguments from the level of a deep
total view and with the ecological crisis in mind. But
supporters of the Deep Ecology movement do not consider the ecological crisis
to be the only global crisis; there are also crises of social justice, and of
war and organized violence. And there are, of course, political problems which
are only distantly related to ecology. Nevertheless, the supporters of the Deep
Ecology movement have something important to contribute to the solution of
these crises: they provide an example of the nonviolent activism needed in the
years to come" (in Sessions 1995, 452).

Naess continues to emphasize that most of supporters of the
DEM are not intellectuals nor ideologues but ordinary people who continue to
struggle to find a way to live based on their core beliefs and values. However,
even when people want to "do the right thing" they are hamstrung by force of habit, a sense of despair, lack of community support
for change, and institutional constraints. Anthropological research in the U.
S. has found widespread acceptance of major principles in the 'platform' of
deep ecology across a wide spectrum of the population including labor union
members, rural and urban residents, as well as members of conservation
organizations (Kempton et al. 1995).

Some researchers suggest the "biophilia
hypothesis" provides a sociobiology explanation for agape,
love of nature as something more than a social construction, although a
biologically-based love of nature is constantly mediated by socio-psychological
expressions of biophilia (Kellert 1993).

The translation of values and the 'intuition' of deep
ecology into action in the midst of industrial civilization requires
purposeful, collective action and attention to "ecological self." The
"ecological self," defined by Naess as "broad
identification" with nature, whether based on biophilia or on experiences
in the "wildness" of nature, has stimulated some of the most
provocative theories developed from a deep ecology perspective (see for example
Mathews 1991; Everden 1993; Macy 1991; Fox 1990). When people have gone from
denial to despair, how do they recatalyze energy to respond effectively and
creatively to the environmental crisis? Teachers such as John Seed and Joanna
Macy have pioneered in developing experiental workshops where participants are
invited to explore "broader identification" through a "council
of all beings" (Seed 1988). At least one researcher has concluded that
experiences individuals have during a "council of all beings" can
assist in helping participants engage in nonviolent direct action based on
their awareness of their "ecological self" as part of an unfolding,
interdependent "net" of relationships (Bragg 1995).

Joanna Macy, and other teachers who are supporters of the
DEM, have demonstrated that participation in the "council of all
beings" and other rituals and exercises designed to explore the
"ecological self," is effective cross-culturally. Macy herself has
led such exercises in Russia, Australia, several European nations, as well as
in the United States with participants from culturally diverse backgrounds.4

Since many supporters of the DEM have been critical of some
of major assumptions of modernity, it is not surprising that deep ecology has
been greeted with hostility both by some critics on the left and critics on the
right, as well as post-modern theorists (for example, van Wyck 1997). However,
as Glasser has documented, some of the criticism of deep ecology perspectives is the result of misconceptions and fallacies
committed by the critics. It is difficult to speak across paradigms when the
basic approach of different paradigms is phrased in language that is
incommersurable (Glasser 1998). The "Eight points" platform of the
DEM formulated by Arne Naess and George Sessions does not concern the question
of what is the main cause of the ecological crisis. There are a variety of
views about causes such as those advanced by social ecologists and
ecofeminists. Supporters of the DEM can also support social ecology and
ecofeminism and vice versa. 5

Some postmodern critics have had special difficulties with
the DEM. But Charlene Spretnak, a scholar who has specialized in the
development of 'green' politics, concludes that 'deconstructionist
postmodernism' should not be confused with 'ecological postmodernism' (Drengson
1996; Spretnak 1997). The key metaphor of 'ecological postmodernism' is ecology
and the primary truth is 'particular-in-context', or bioregionalism.

Naess asserts that there are three great social movements of
the 20th century--the ecology movement, the peace movement, and the social
justice movement. These three movements speak to our yearning for liberation
and can be compatible with each other in specific political campaigns. However,
in situations of conflict, priorities must be established.

Soon after Earthday 1970, commentators were warning of
possible conflicts between environment and civil rights (Hutchins 1976) and
between economic growth and environmental quality (Heller 1973). As the deep
ecology perspective became more widely discussed during the 1980s, critics from
postmodern schools of thought, feminism, and social ecology argued strenuously
for nonessentialist, anthropocentric approachs to environmental ethics.
Supporters of the DEM demonstrated that there are parallels between ecofeminism
and deep ecology (Fox 1989; Plumwood 1992).

Some critics assume that the DEM is inappropriate for the
Third World because the Third World must address problems of militarism,
poverty, food supply, and demands for gender equality (Guha 1989). On the
contrary, supporters of the DEM conclude it is most appropriate for the Third
World because of its emphasis on long-range sustainability of natural systems
within which humans as well as all other species must dwell (Naess 1995; Cafaro
1998).

During the 1980s and 1990s, shallow or reform environmental
movements continued to emphasize the tenet that "sustainable economic
growth and development" for both developed and "underdeveloped"
societies is desirable, and indeed necessary, in
order to achieve goals of cleaner air and water as well as protection of
natural resources for sustained use by a growing human population (see the
Bruntland Report, Our Common Future 1987, and Agenda 21 approved by the Rio
Summit on Development and the Environment 1992). The subtext of all the major
documents, based on reform environmentalism, is that an increasing population
of humans will "sustainably" use increasing amounts of "natural
resources" by ef-ficiently using evolving technologies such as
biotechnology, computer technology, nanotechnology, and energy technology.

Most of the documents issued at world conferences on the
environment fail to clearly answer the questions "what is being
sustained," "how long is it being sustained," and "how will
conflicts between priorities or between the short-term interests of various
categories of people be resolved?" "How will priorities of the
current generation of humans and future generations be resolved?"

Supporters of the DEM recognize the need to address the
great disparity between the opportunities of people living in the Third World
to sustain their vital needs and people living in Japan, the United States,
Canada, and the European Union. Much effort has been given by supporters of the
DEM to addressing issues of environmental justice raised by a globalizing
economy and the impact of free trade treaties such as NAFTA (and the WTO) on
our ability to speak for the protection of wild species and their habitat, as
well as the impact that global financial structures have on the lives of
ordinary people around the world (Mander 1991).

When the demands for redistribution of money, power, and
wealth, in the short-term, between more wealthy and less wealthy societies,
between genders, between age groups, between politically defined ethnic groups,
and so forth, become the primary agenda of social activists, there is a danger,
as George Sessions has concluded, of "the demise of the ecology
movement" because social justice concerns frequently replace concern for
the ecological integrity of the Earth (Sessions 1995b, 1995c ). While many
social issues can be addressed simultaneously, even if a utopian social justice
society could be established, it may be on a planet that is rapidly losing
biodiversity, primary forests, and free nature.

Warnings to Humanity

Before the Rio Summit on Development and the Environment in
1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists circulated the World Scientists'
Warning to Humanity, signed by over 1,700
scientists, including 104 Nobel laureates. The Warning stated, in part,
"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course . . . A
great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if
vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on the planet is not to
be irretrievably mutilated . . . No more than one or a few decades remain
before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost"
(Ehrlich 1996, Appendix B).

In April 1999, the World Commission on Forests, created
after the Rio Summit of 1992, concluded that nearly 15 million hectares of
primary for-ests, an area the size of England and Wales, have been lost due to
logging and other human activities each year since 1980. Original frontier
forests have all but disappeared in 76 countries, and declined by at least 95 %
in 11 countries. The planet's original forest cover of 6 billion hectares has
been reduced to 3.6 billion hectares (World Commission on Forests 1999).

During the 1980s some commentators suggested that the 1990s
would be a "turnaround decade" or a "turning point" where
rapid changes would encourage the emergence of a new social paradigm or a new
type of social organization based on ecology (Capra 1982). Has a paradigm shift
occurred, or is it occurring on a planetary scale at the beginning of the 21st century?

It is widely accepted that reform environmentalism is now
part of the political agenda of most nations. Politicians are expected to
include "the environment" as part of their campaign promises and
public policy objectives. Many governments of developing nations are willing to
participate in conservation programs--if they are given cash in exchange for
their participation, such as the "debt for nature" agreements reached
with some nations in South America. Findings from cross-cultural surveys
indicate that even in poor nations, there is widespread awareness of and
concern with environmental issues (Brechin 1994). Radical grassroots
environmental movements have developed in many Third World nations (Taylor
1995). Whether or not motivated by deep ecology or reform environmental
perspective or demands for tribal or First Nations sovereignty from national
governments, grassroots movements have irritated governments, some
corporations, and other economic and political interest groups who ignited a
backlash against radical environmentalism both in the United States and in many
developing nations. Campaigns of suppression, detention, and even murder of
grassroots radical environmentalists have been extensively documented (Rowell
1996).

Leaders of all the major world religions including Native
American pantheism, Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholic, Buddhism, Islam, and
Judaism have presented statements that echo the World Scientists' Warning to
Humanity. Religious leaders have presented statements affirming that
conservation is part of their ethical teachings and that humans have no right
to destroy the integrity of natural systems (Oelschlaeger 1994).

In 1982, the United Nations General Assembly passed the
World Charter for Nature, sponsored by a Third World nation--Zaire--with only
one dissenting vote, the United States. The World Charter contains significant
deep ecology statements including,

1. Nature shall be respected and its essential processes
shall not be disrupted.

2. The genetic viability on the earth shall not be
compromised; the population level of all life forms, wild and domesticated,
must be at least sufficient for their survival, and to this end necessary
habitats shall be maintained.

3. All areas, both land and sea, shall be subject to these
principles of conservation; special protection shall be given to unique areas,
representative sample of all ecosystems and the habitats of rare and endangered
species.

4. Ecosystems and organisms, as well as land, marine and
atmospheric resources which are utilized by man shall be managed to achieve and
maintain optimum sustainable productivity, but not in such a way as to endanger
the integrity of those other ecosystems or species with which they coexist.

5. Nature shall be secured against degradation caused by
warfare or other hostile activities.

The Charter challenges national and local governments to
select the appropriate mix of social, political, and economic methods to
achieve their goals (Wood 1985). However, the major world environmental
conferences held during the 1990s, including the Rio Summit on Development and
the Environment (1992) and the Kyoto Conference on Global Warming (1998),
presented documents that retreated from deep ecological statements found in the
World Charter for Nature.

Even by their own anthropocentric criteria, the world
environmental conferences of the 1990s have had limited success. Five years
after the Rio summit, the United Nations Environmental Programme issued a
report, The Global Environmental Outlook. The
report concludes that "significant progress has been made in confronting
environmental challenges. Nevertheless, the environment has continued to
degrade in nations of all regions. Progress toward a sustainable future has
simply been too slow" (UNEP 1997).

Agenda 21, the document approved by governments attending
the Rio Summit, clearly states that sustainable development would be achieved
through trade liberalization. Since the Rio Summit, forest destruction from
Mexico to Siberia and from Brazil to Indonesia has increased due to the impetus
provided by "free trade" and globalization of the timber trade
(Menotti 1998).

An Earth Charter was to have guided the Rio Summit on
Environment and Development, but governments could not agree on such a
statement of ethical principles. However, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
were interested in the idea and formed a network of NGOs to develop a citizens'
Earth Charter. In early 1997, an Earth Charter Commission composed of
distinguished persons from each continent was appointed at a meeting of
international NGOs to draft a citizens' Earth Charter.

A Draft Earth Charter was released in March 1997 at the
Rio+5 Forum. The Earth Charter is supposed to provide "an ethical
framework for decision making on all matters of environment and
development." The Draft Earth Charter contains eighteen planks. The first
plank says, "Respect Earth and all life. Earth, each life form, and all
living beings possess intrinsic value and warrant respect independent of their
utilitarian value to humanity," and plank 2, "Care for Earth,
protecting and restoring the diversity, integrity, and beauty of the planet's
ecosystems. Where there is risk of irreversible or serious damage to the
environment, precautionary action must be taken to prevent harm."

The clear statement that ecological sustainability must take
precedence in all policy decisions in the citizens' Draft Earth Charter
contrasts starkly with the development tone of official Agenda 21 documents
released through the United Nations.

The United Nations sponsored Cairo conference on Development
and Population in 1994 presented documents primarily devoted to development of
women's opportunities to participate in economic growth in Third World nations.
Decline in birth rates was linked to "empowerment" of women and to
"economic opportunities" for women in a growing economy. It was
assumed that if women participate in economic growth under capitalism, have access to contraceptives and choice on abortions, and
are more educated, that the birth rate will fall. Some critics of the Cairo
conference statement, including representatives of Moslem nations and the
Catholic church, noted the ideological tone of the Cairo statement and failure
of the Cairo statement to respect cultural diversity. Five years after the
Cairo conference, at a world conference of governments and nongovernmental
organizations called to assess the outcomes of the Cairo conference, the
political consensus of 1994 was in disarray. The environmental caucus of
Cairo+5 in particular insisted that "we cannot address access to food,
water safety, and migration without addressing the environment as well. A
healthy environment should be a priority when seeking to address human health
and welfare." 6 It was also unclear if contributing
nations would raise the programmed $10 billion a year for implementation of the
Cairo agreement and the anticipated $22 billion a year that will be needed by
2015.

The United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in
1995 included "environment" as one of the twelve planks in its
"platform for action." However, that plank read, "Eliminate all
obstacles to women's full and equal participation in sustainable development
with equal access to and control over resources; integrate rural women's
traditional knowledge and practices into environmental management programs;
support women's consumer initiatives by promoting recycling, organic food
production and marketing and product labeling that is clear to the
illiterate."

There was no plank in the women's platform that emphasized
the role of women in maintaining wide ecological sustainability by responsibly
limiting the number of children they have, nor any support for intrinsic values
of other species, nor support for programs that protect the habitat of native
species in each bioregion. In commenting on this platform, a British writer,
Sandy Irvine, concludes, " . . . Some fundamental aspects of the
eco-crisis, particularly overpopulation, are ignored or denied. Organisations
such as the Women's Environment Movement specifically deny that existing human
numbers are already too great for the global ecosystem to sustain" (Irvine
1995).

With the prospect of a conscious, collective movement of
rapid social turnaround fading, some supporters of the DEM suggest that the
human species has exceeded the limits of natural systems to respond to
anthropogenic changes, and that radical changes in human society will occur
during the 21st century because "nature bats last"
(Catton 1980a; Meadows et al. 1992).

In his 1971 book, The Closing Circle, Barry
Commoner summarized these 'laws' of ecology: Nature is more complex than we
know, and probably more complex than we can know. Everything has to go
somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And, the most controversial
'law', Nature knows best (Commoner 1971). Some commentators conclude that
humans in industrial civilization have become like a cancer on the planet,
killing the host organism.

Other visionary writers hypothesize that as a species Homo
sapiens is evolving toward a planetary civilization that " . . .
will come from the synergy of the collective experience and wisdom of the
entire human family--the entire species. The world has become
so interdependent that we must make it together, transcending differences of
race, ethnicity, geography, religion, politics, and gender. It is the
human species that must learn to live together as a civilized
and mutually supportive community. To focus on the development of civility
among the human species is not to inflate unduly the
importance of humanity within the ecosystem of life on Earth; rather it is to
recognize how dangerous the human race is to the viability of the Earth's
ecosystem. Humanity must begin consciously to develop a planetary-scale,
species-civilization that is able to live in a harmonious relationship with the
rest of the web of live" (Elgin 1993, 14).

Philosopher Thomas Berry calls this project the "great
work" of humans. Berry concludes that humans live in a "moment of
grace" as we move into the 21st century which enables
humanity to "be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial way"
(Berry 1999). Others believe that Gaia herself, a conscious, self-organizing
system, will regulate such an unruly species as Homo sapiens. The
Gaia hypothesis has stimulated not only controversy among scientists but also
has stimulated numerous religious, mystical, and feminist responses that
indicate a yearning for integration with the "Earth Mother." 7

Naess himself says he remains an optimist "for the 22nd
century." "There is no time for overly pessimistic statements that
can be exploited by passivists and those who promote complacency. The
realization of what we call wide ecological sustainability of
the human enterprise on this unique planet may take a long time, but the more
we increase unsustainability this year, and in the years to
come, the longer it will take. . . . The Deep Ecology movement is concerned
with what can be done today, but I forsee no definite victories
scarcely before the twenty-second century" (in Sessions 1995a, 464).

The resurgence of interest in bioregionalism, restoration,
locally-based agriculture, and new initiatives to establish huge nature
reserves in many nations indicates that supporters of the DEM will continue to
be leaders in developing new agendas for the conservation movement as we move
into the 21st century. For example, there is a growing number
of alliances between conservation groups and tribal or First Nation peoples (a
designation most commonly used in Canada) with the objective of assisting
traditional cultures and protecting wildness. From Ecuador to British Columbia,
numerous NGOs continue to implement projects with tribal and First Nation
peoples. 8

Yet, since liberals and conservatives, capitalists and
socialists, as well as green parties in Europe, Japan, and North America, have
found it difficult to integrate a deep ecology perspective and environmental
justice agenda into their political agendas, it is difficult to see where the
political momentum for radical social change based on the norm of wide
ecological sustainability will arise. Fritjof Capra, however, concludes that
"while the transformation (from one paradigm to another) is taking place,
the declining culture refuses to change, clinging ever more rigidly to its
outdated ideas; nor will the dominant social institutions hand over their
leading roles to the new cultural forces. But they will inevitably go on to
decline and disintegrate while the rising culture will continue to rise, and
eventually will assume its leading role. As the turning point approaches, the
realization that evolutionary changes of this magnitude cannot be prevented by
short-term political activities provides our strongest hope for the
future" (Capra 1982, 419).

Joanna Macy, and other visionary scholar/teachers who are
supporters of the deep, long-range ecology movement and who utilize system
theory approaches in their teaching, emphasize that emergent forms of social
organization that arise out of the chaos and breakdown of current social
systems may be very different from present forms of social organization and
cannot be predicted based on linear trend analysis.

Conclusion

Ecological systems approaches to global modeling and
analysis have developed extensively over the past several decades to the extent
that some scientists are calling for "international ecosystem
assessment." These scientists argue that an international system of
ecosystem modelling and monitoring, integrating the many differing
factors--climate change, biodiversity loss, food supply and demand, forest
loss, water availability and quality--is
urgently needed. The magnitude of human impacts on ecosystems is escalating.
One-third of global land cover will be transformed in the next hundred years.
In twenty years world demand for rice, wheat, and maize will rise by 40%.
Demands for water and wood will double over the next half-century. At the turn
of the millennium, they argue, we need to undertake the first global assessment
of the condition and future prospects of global ecosystems (Ayensu 1999).

The continuing collective efforts to change human behavior
to forestall global warming indicates that some attempts at effective political
action in the face of a "global environmental crisis" are being made
(Depledge 1999). Deep ecology perspectives and the DEM have contributed to the
development of ecophilosophy, ecopsychology, and intellectual discussions of
these issues over the past four decades, in particular by helping people
articulate and develop their own ecosophy both individually and as part of a
community (Glasser 1996). However, how the planet as an interdependent
ecosystem, subject to increasing and generally negative human interventions,
will fare in the 21st century remains an open question.

There are those who see hope for the future of Homo
sapiens living in harmony with the rest of nature. They maintain
that Homo sapiens have the capacity to develop into mature
human beings both as individuals and collectively if humanity practices CPE on
the earth--conservation, preservation, restoration (Brower 1995). Others,
seeing that even small populations of Homo sapiens armed with
simple but very effective technology of fire and stone arrowhead have, over the
past 35,000 years, had immense impact on landscapes of whole continents (such
as Australia), and conclude that at bestHomo sapiens can be seen as
an auto immune disease on the world system, on Gaia, or as a cancer on the
world system that at this time has begun to destroy the vital organs of the
planet.

Another forecast is presented by Bill Joy, chief engineer
for Sun Electronics and one of the creators of Java for the Internet. He begins
with Murphy's Law, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong," and
with the premise from systems theory that when systems involved are complex,
involving interaction among and feedback between many parts, any changes in
such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is
especially true when human actions are involved. Joy explores the unintended
consequence of developing the new fields of technology including robotics,
genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.

Since "biological species almost never survive
encounters with superior competitors" and given that robotics, at the
current rate of development, could be superior
in intelligence to Homo sapiens within fifty years, and could
self-replicate, it is likely that cyborgs will out-compete current Homo
sapiens and win control of the planet. For Joy, the only hope
for Homo sapiens in the 21st century is if, as
a species, we relinquish research on robotics, genetic engineering, and
nanotechnology. Exploring the love and compassion that is more basic to our
humanness than the "will to power" in capitalist, free-market
economies based on exponential growth of technology, humans can enter a path
toward a utopia based on altruism (Joy 2000).

We are left to contemplate the question asked by John Muir,
considered by many historians to be the founder of the American conservation
movement, in 1875. Returning to the Central Valley of California, after
spending another summer meditating in the Sierra Nevada, Muir wrote in his
journal:

Every sense is satisfied. For us there is no past, no
future--we live only in the present and are full. No room for hungry
hopes--none for regrets--none for exaltation--none for fears.

Enlarge sphere of ideas. The mind invigorated by the
acquisition of new ideas. Flexibility, elasticity.

I often wonder what men will do with the mountains. That is,
with their utilizable, destructable garments. Will he cut down all, and make
ships and houses with the trees? If so, what will be the final and far upshot?
Will human destruction, like those of Nature--fire, flood, and avalanche--work
out a higher good, a finer beauty. Will a better civilization come, in accord with
obvious nature, and all this wild beauty be set to human poetry? Another
outpouring of lava or the coming of the glacial period could scarce wipe out
the flowers and flowering shrubs more effectively than do the sheep. And what
then is coming--what is the human part of the mountain's destiny? (Engberg and
Wesling 1980, 162)

Acknowledgment

The author expresses thanks to Harold Glasser for his
extensive commentary and help on preliminary drafts of this article.

Bill Devall (1938-2009) was a consultant to the Foundation for Deep Ecology in San Francisco and Professor Emeritus in Sociology at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. Devall was a well-known lecturer and author, most notably (with George Sessions) of the influential book, Deep Ecology (1985), and Simple in Means, Rich in Ends (1988), Living Richly in an Age of Limits(1992), and Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Logging (1993). He also wrote a book on bioregional politics and culture, Bioregion on the Edge.

Notes

1. The Selected Works of Arne Naess,
edited by Harold Glasser and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, will be
available in early 2001. Information concerning the current status of this
project is available from the Foundation for Deep Ecology, Building 1062, Ft.
Cronkhite, Sausalito, CA 94965.

2. Naess frequently uses the term "free
nature" to refer to landscapes that are relatively unmodified by human
activities. Other supporters of the DEM frequently use the term "wild
nature" to refer to landscapes that may contain human communities such as tribal societies, but are relatively untrammeled by industrial civilization,
agriculture, roads, cattle, or sheep grazing. Henry David Thoreau expressed one
of the central axioms of the modern conservation movement when he wrote
"in wildness is the preservation of the world."

Virtually all regions of the planet are currently impacted
by planetary industrial civilization as witnessed by "global
warming," the "hole in the ozone layer," and massive
deforestation of all the primary forests on the planet (World Commission on
Forests 1999).

4. Recent educational material on the deep,
long-range ecology movement includes the 13-part radio series, "Deep
Ecology for the 21st Century," available from New Dimensions Broadcasting
Network, P.O.Box 569, Ukiah CA 95482. Two videos highlight the work of Arne
Naess in articulating deep ecology; "Crossing the Stones," produced
by Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation in 1992 and available in the United
States from Bullfrog Films, Oley PA; and "The Call of the Mountain,"
produced by ReRun Produkties in 1997, distributed in the United States by the
Foundation for Deep Ecology, Building 1062, Ft. Cronkhite, Sausalito, CA 94965.

5. The International Forum on Globalization,
Building 1062, Ft. Cronkhite, Sausalito, CA 94965, provides books, articles and
other material on the environmental and social impacts of globalization.

6. Population and Habitat Update: Cariro+5:
Identifying Successes, New Challenges: National Audubon Society's Population
and Habitat Campaign, May/June 1999.

7. When James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis
presented the Gaia Hypothesis, it was embraced by the broader public before it
was embraced by the community of scientists (Lovelock 1987). Surfing through
Amazon.com, I found more than 120 books that use the word Gaia in titles published
after 1988. These included "a guided meditation for vibrational medicine
cards and Gaia matrix oracle," "from eros to Gaia," "Gaia
and God: an ecofeminist theology of earth healing," "gay and Gaia,
ethics, ecology, and the erotic," and "the goddess in the office: a
personal energy guide for the spiritual warrior at work."

8. The agenda of the DEM now includes
"rewilding," a term not yet found in the dictionaries. According to
Michael Soule, author of numerous books on biodiversity and president of The
Wildlands Project, rewilding means "the process of protecting Nature by
putting all the ecological pieces back together and restoring the landscape to
its full glory and building a network of conservation reserves--cores,
corridors, and mixed-use buffers--with enough land to allow wolves, jaguars,
bears and other large carnivores to move freely and reclaim a part of their
former range" (Soule 1998).

Seed, John, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess.
1988. Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings.
Santa Cruz, Calif.: New Society Publishers.

Sessions, George.1981. "Shallow and Deep Ecology: A
Review of the Philosophical Literature." In Robert C. Schultz and J.
Donald Hughes, eds. Ecological Consciousness: Essays from
the Earthday X Colloquium, University of Denver, April 21-24, 1980.
Washington, D.C.: University Press of America.

Sessions, George, ed.1995a. Deep Ecology for the
21st Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New
Environmentalism. Boston: Shambhala.

------. 1995b."Postmodernism and Environmental Justice:
The Demise of the Ecology Movement?" The Trumpeter 12
(3): 150-154.

The capacity of the human mind to alter its own responses is one of
the wonders of nature. It is a vital foundation for culture, progress,
achievement, morality and individual success. This article provides an overview
of a research programme that has been pursued for the past two decades. It has
led the researchers to bring back the Victorian notion of willpower as a
limited supply of energy that is used for control and self-discipline – and
several other important phenomena, including making decisions. Self-control
processes link together mind with body, present with future and past, resisting
temptation with making choices, and a remarkably wide range of daily activities
with each other.

What is the most important and desirable trait? What would you most
wish your child to have, or your rivals to lack? What trait is most important
for helping people lead happy, successful and useful lives? Decade after
decade, psychologists keep coming up with the same two answers. One is
intelligence. The other is self-control. Nothing else comes close.

Early in my career I studied self-esteem, which in the 1970s and
1980s seemed to hold the promise of being a powerful key to mental health and
successful behaviour. But self-esteem ultimately disappointed most of us: its
benefits are quite limited (see Baumeister et al., 2003). So for the past two
decades my research has focused on self-control .

People use self-control quite frequently. A recent study (Hofmann
et al., in press) had 200 people wear beepers for a week, and at random
intervals they were asked to report on whether they felt any desire, and if so
how strongly, whether they tried to resist it, and how successful that
resistance was. Out of 10,000 responses, 7000 desires were reported. Efforts at
self-control were common: people reported resisting two out of every five
desires. Thus, much of the average day is spent trying to control one’s wants
and needs. What’s more, this resistance was often successful. With no
resistance, people enacted 70 per cent of their desires; with resistance the
rate dropped to only 17 per cent.

Self-control is what people use to restrain their desires and impulses.
More precisely, it can be understood as the capacity to override one
response(and substitute another). It is largely synonymous with
‘self-regulation’, a term preferred by many researchers because of its greater
precision. To regulate is to change; namely, change in the direction of some standard, some idea about how something could or should be.
Self-regulation thus means changing responses based on some rule, value or
ideal.

Most self-regulation occurs in one of four spheres. People regulate
thought, such as trying to concentrate or shut an annoying tune out of their
minds. They regulate emotion and mood, such as when trying to feel better. They
regulate impulse, such as when resisting temptation. And they regulate
performance, such as by trading off speed and accuracy, or persevering despite
a discouraging failure.

How self-control works

Self-control depends on multiple processes. Pioneering work by
Carver and Scheier (e.g. 1981) applied feedback-loop theory to self-regulation.
People compare their current status to the standard, make appropriate changes,
compare again, and exit the loop when the need for change has been satisfied.

My work has focused on the processes of change, and has shown that
successful self-control depends on a limited energy resource. The folk notion
of willpower is not far off the mark. When people exert self-control, they use
up some of this energy, leaving them in a temporarily depleted state. If they
try to exert self-control again soon after – even in some sphere unrelated to
the first exertion – they tend to do worse than if they had not previously
exerted self-control.

Thus, self-control is like a muscle that gets tired. People may
start the day fresh and rested, but as they exert self-control over the course
of the day, their powers may diminish. Many researchers have observed that
self-control tends to break down late in the day, especially if it has been a
demanding or stressful day. Most diets are broken in the evening, sexual
misdeeds and addictive relapses occur at the end of long and demanding days. In
some cases, there are more temptations available in the evening than the
morning – though that may just reflect the marketplace adapting to where its
customers are.

Some of our first experiments supported the view of self-control as
a limited resource. In one, participants arrived at the lab after skipping a
meal, and their hunger was further stoked by seating them in front of a tray of
freshly baked cookies and candies. Also in front of them was a bowl of radishes.
Some were told that their task was to eat only the radishes and not the sweets.
They were left alone for five minutes, ostensibly to do their radish tasting,
but the real point was to make them struggle to resist eating the sweets. There
were two control conditions, one of which was told to eat the sweets (and not
the radishes), and the other skipped the food part of the study altogether
(Baumeister et al., 1998).

Later, all participants were given some difficult (in fact
unsolvable) puzzles, and we timed how long they kept trying until they gave up,
a procedure adapted from stress research. Trying over and over despite
discouraging failure takes inner strength, including the self-discipline to
persevere instead of quitting so as to go do something more pleasant.

We found that the participants in the radish condition gave up
significantly faster than those in the control conditions. Apparently,
resisting the temptation to eat sweets took something out of them – depleted
their willpower – leaving them with fewer resources to persevere on the next,
seemingly unrelated task.

Over the next decade, many more studies of this sort were done. A
meta-analysis by Hagger et al. (2010) combined results from 83 such studies and
confirmed the general pattern of what has come to be called ‘ego depletion’ –
the idea that self-control or willpower is an exhaustible resource, and that if
it is used up, mental activity requiring self-control is impaired. The term
‘ego depletion’ was chosen in part as homage to Freud, because he was one of
the last theorists to discuss the self in terms of energy. By the 1980s and
1990s, most self theories had emphasised information and concepts, not energy.
But our work indicates that one important part of the self is the well of
energy that it expends when it regulates its responses.

Two important implications of these findings require emphasis.
First, all self-control tasks draw on the same energy resource. That is, when
you, for example, hold your tongue, resist an urge to smoke, drink or eat,
restrain aggression, postpone using the toilet, feign mirth at an inane joke,
push yourself to keep working, it depletes some crucial energy and leaves you
with less available for meeting the next challenge. Many seemingly unrelated
things are therefore linked in this regard.

Second, willpower is limited. In the radish study, five minutes of
resisting the temptation to eat chocolate cookies produced a drop of ten
minutes in how long people persevered at a stressful task. Thus, even just
minor exertions of self-control can make a substantial difference.

Extending the strength model

Self-control resembles a muscle in more ways than one. Not only
does it show fatigue, in the sense that it seems to lose power right after
being used, it also gets stronger after exercise. (The fatigue effect is
immediate; the strengthening is delayed, just like with muscular exercise.)
After people perform exercises designed to strengthen self-control for a couple
weeks, they do better on lab tests of self-control (even ones completely
different from what they exercised) and report improvements in multiple spheres
of their lives (for review, see Baumeister et al., 2006). Smokers who
strengthened their self-control by doing handgrip muscle exercises or avoiding
sweet foods were later more successful than others at quitting smoking
(Muraven, 2010).

How much willpower do people have? It might seem that they do not
have much, given that ego depletion effects begin after just a few minutes of
exerting self-control. But this is misleading, and again the muscle analogy is
helpful. When athletes exert their muscles, they get tired gradually. After
some exertion, they begin to conserve their remaining energy (which may be
considerable). Hence fatigue effects can show up relatively early, whereas
complete exhaustion of the muscles is rarely seen.

Ego depletion effects are mostly conservation effects rather than
exhaustion effects. Muraven et al. (2006) showed that even after people become
depleted they can perform well if there is a compelling reason to do so – but
then they are much more depleted if another demand for self-control comes
along. Like a tired athlete who summons up a great exertion for the last lap,
they allocate their resources judiciously once these begin to be depleted.
Muraven et al. (2006) also showed that people hold back more when they expect
subsequent demands than when they think they are confronting the final demand.

What gets depleted?

Willpower is folk term and a metaphor for psychological processes.
What is the actual process? By accident, my research group stumbled on an
important key to the physiology of willpower.

Glucose is a chemical in the bloodstream. It is ‘brain fuel’ in the
sense that it provides energy for brain activities. Neurotransmitters are made
from glucose. Glucose is also used to furnish energy for much of the body’s other
activities, including muscular exertion and even the immune system. Glucose is
made from nutritious food (not just sugar) and either used or stored for later
use.

Our interest in glucose began when an experiment on another
hypothesis went awry. We were testing the alluring hypothesis that if resisting
temptation weakened self-control, maybe yielding to temptation would strengthen
subsequent self-control. Participants underwent a depleting exercise in
self-control, and some were given a bowl of ice cream to eat. Sure enough, the
people who enjoyed this pleasant indulgence showed an improvement in
self-control performance on the next task. Unfortunately for that hypothesis,
we included a control condition in which people consumed a large portion of
tedious, unappetising food, which hardly constituted a pleasant indulgence –
and they also showed an improvement in self-control afterwards. This got us to
wondering, if the recovery of willpower was not attributable to the pleasure,
could it be simply the calories?

A series of experiments confirmed that willpower is tied to glucose
(Gailliot et al., 2007). After people exert self-control, even on artificial
lab tasks, their blood glucose levels drop. Low levels of blood glucose predict
poor performance on tests of self-control. Most dramatically, the effects of
ego depletion can be counteracted by giving people a dose of glucose.

The link to glucose provides a new perspective on self-control. For
example, a recent study showed that the decisions of judges regarding parole
fluctuate over the day in a manner that suggests ego depletion and glucose
(Danziger et al., 2011). Sending a convict back to prison is the safe and easy
decision, whereas granting parole puts the judge at risk, because if the
parolee commits another crime, the judge will look bad and possibly be blamed.
It therefore takes more energy to grant parole than to deny it. Judges get
depleted as they make decision after decision. Hence a convict applying for
parole fares reasonably well first thing in the morning, when the judge is
fresh and well-fed, but as the morning wears on, the chances go down. The
judges then have a break for a mid-morning snack, and another for lunch, and
their rates of granting parole shoot up dramatically at these points – and then
resume dropping. A convict whose case comes up just before lunch has a near
zero probability of being paroled, whereas one who comes before the board right
after lunch has a good (65 per cent) chance of getting out of prison.

Glucose may also hold a key to understanding premenstrual syndrome
(PMS). Folklore suggests that PMS occurs because women mysteriously acquire
antisocial impulses and tendencies at a certain time each month. Instead,
Gailliot et al. (2010) proposed that the extra metabolic demands of the luteal
phase of the menstrual cycle siphon off a large portion of the body’s glucose
supply, leaving less available for self-control. (Many women eat more during
this stage, but most do not increase their caloric intake enough to offset the
extra metabolic demands of the reproductive system). Hence the self-discipline
and restraint that normally manage the woman’s behaviour are harder to sustain,
and a broad variety of breakdowns occur – aggression, petty crime, smoking,
drinking, overeating, emotional outbursts, drug use, and so forth. In other
words, PMS is not a matter of new antisocial impulses but rather a wholesale
weakening of restraints, caused by the body’s relative lack of glucose
available for self-control.

When willpower is low

Researchers have illuminated many of the effects of ego depletion
on a wide assortment of behaviours. Some are standard foci of self-control. As
a standard example, dieters eat more fattening food when their willpower has
been depleted (Vohs & Heatherton, 2000); and the same study showed no
change in eating among non-dieters. Thus, depletion only alters behaviour when
people are trying to restrain or control it. Dieters wish to restrain their
eating, and so ego depletion makes them eat more. In a similar vein, aggression
increases with ego depletion – but only among people who have been provoked and
angered and therefore have aggressive impulses that they would normally
restrain (DeWall et al., 2007).

Aggression is of course a particularly prominent social problem as
well as a professional concern of many psychologists. In 2011 I attended the
conference of the Division of Forensic Psychology of the British Psychological
Society and had lively discussions with researchers and practitioners
interested in domestic violence. Laboratory and field studies by Finkel et al.
(2009) have shown that even nonviolent couples tend to treat each other in more
abusive ways when their self-control resources are depleted. Fortunately, that
work also showed that strengthening willpower via self-control exercises
reduced the tendency to engage in intimate partner violence.

Even apart from violence and abuse, close relationships benefit
from self-control (Vohs et al., 2011), and good practices deteriorate when
willpower is depleted. Intimate partners in good relationships often shield
their partners from blame, but under ego depletion they start to blame their
partners more (Vohs & Baumeister, 2008). Depletion makes them also pay more
attention to attractive members of the opposite sex, which could increase their
temptation to stray (Vohs & Baumeister, 2008). Sexual inhibitions are also
reduced during ego depletion, making people unusually willing to do sexual
things they would normally resist (Gailliot & Baumeister, 2007).

Likewise, most people normally restrain their prejudices, but these
are more likely to emerge when people are depleted, and restraining prejudice
can deplete people so that their self-control suffers in other domains
(Richeson & Trawalter, 2005). Exercising self-control can help people
restrain their prejudices, as can a dose of glucose (Gailliot et al., 2007).

Self-control has been called the ‘moral muscle’ because it provides
the power to do what is right. Not surprisingly, virtue deteriorates quickly under
ego depletion. Experimental studies have shown that people become more willing
to cheat and steal when depleted (Mead et al., 2009).

Another easily overlooked application of willpower is for thinking.
To be sure, some thought processes are automatic and therefore require minimal
energy, but strenuous and demanding forms of thought such as logical reasoning
and extrapolation require disciplined mental effort. People’s IQ scores dropped
substantially under ego depletion, as did their performance on other tests of
logic, though rote memory and other automatic processes were unaffected
(Schmeichel et al., 2003).

Beyond self-control

The processes by which the human body uses its central energy
supply to override its responses and regulate its actions are clearly an
important part of the human self. Yet perhaps those processes have even wider
applications than just self-control.

One turning point came in a
paper by Vohs et al. (2008). That article showed that making choices and
decisions depletes the self: after making decisions, self-control was impaired.
A companion paper a year later by Pocheptsova et al. (2009) reversed the
sequence and showed that after exerting self-control, decision making was
altered in various ways. Depleted deciders were less prone than others to
compromise and more prone to fall prey to irrational bias. They also showed
some tendency to duck or postpone decisions if they could.

The implication is that making decisions draws on the same
(glucose) energy that is used for self-control. Possibly this could help
explain the endless stream of news stories about politicians and other
authority figures who get caught up in sex scandals or other forms of
misbehaviour: they expend their energy making decisions, leaving them without
enough for ordinary self-control. Lab work has in fact shown that leaders pour
extra energy into their work, often rendering them more depleted than other
people (DeWall et al., 2011). Unpublished work also suggests that initiative is depleting. After
exerting self-control, people tend to respond in passive ways and take default
options (Vohs & Baumeister, 2010).

The combination of self-control, decision making, and initiative
prompted me to begin discussing this work in the context of free will. Many
philosophical works on free will invoke just those sorts of behaviours, without
realising that they all share a common psychological and physiological
substrate.

The notion of free will is controversial, but I assume most people
accept the reality of self-control, initiative and rational choice. The common
process that produces those three types of behaviours is almost certainly the
psychological reality behind the popular notion of free will. Either it is
exactly what free will is, or it is what is mistaken for free will. In any
case, this link further extends the importance of understanding and knowing how
to use this important human resource.

Getting the most from life

This article has provided an overview of my research program, but
many other questions remain, such as how to raise children with good
self-control, and how to manage the limited resource for best results. Those
wishing for a broader and fuller discussion are invited to consult my
co-authored book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011).

One important conclusion in that book is a newly emerging sense of
how successful people manage the limited resource. The popular image of
self-control and willpower still conforms to traditional ideas of the person
using inner strength to fend off strong temptations and cope with crises. Yet
increasingly the evidence is suggesting that the most successful people, and
indeed those with the best self-control, spend relatively less time than others
struggling with temptations and crises. Yes, willpower can be used for such
things – but it can also be used to set up one’s life to run smoothly so as to
avoid those demands and problems. Trait self-control has been especially
successful at predicting performance at school and work, which depends less on
the single heroic feat of will than on having steady, reliable work habits. Put
another way, some people use their willpower to study all night before the
exam, but others use it more effectively by keeping up with their work so they
don’t have to stay up all night at the last minute. If anything, they make sure
to get a good night’s sleep so they are well rested for the exam.

Willpower may have an unappealing, Victorian reputation. But it is
simply a matter of using one’s physical and mental energy to reach one’s goals
and get the most out of life. It is one of the most important human traits and
a key to long-term success in life.

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---- In Solidarity with Quebec's Student Movement ----

To respond “at the right times with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way, is what is appropriate and best, and this is characteristic of excellence.”Aristotle (EN, 1106b21-3)